In the electronic age, our homes are filled with various household electronic appliances. These range from computers to audio-visual equipment to thermostats to kitchen appliances. All of these electronic devices need to be set-up with initial information such as the current time of day and date and other information depending on the device.
The most common information that must be programmed into household appliances is the current time of day. Almost every household appliance that requires some programming or initial set up requires the consumer to enter the current time. Unfortunately, this seemingly simple process is not as simple as one would hope, as can be seen by how often comics and sitcoms base jokes on the infamous flashing "12:00" on consumer's VCRs.
Even so, the life of consumers would not be so bad if they only had to set the time on each of their household appliances once. However, every time the locality switches between standard and daylight savings time, every time the power goes out and every time an appliance gets unplugged, the consumer has to reprogram the time of day on each affected appliance. When an appliance has more data that has to be entered every time the power goes out, such as automatic sprinkler timers, this problem is magnified many fold.